The One Million Rules per Second Script Language
ALEV is a modern, extremely easy to use, extensible, super-fast (1) scripting language that is embedded in the Tango/04 SmartConsole and other products.

You probably know already how to use it, as it has a pseudocode-like syntax (as Pascal has). It is very easy to understand and maintain ALEV scripts.

The only BSM-oriented Script Language
ALEV was designed by Tango/04 to work hand in hand with the SmartConsole with event transformation, handling and correlation in mind. Thus, it is a perfect fit for Security Event Management and Business Service Management.

It has lots of event manipulation functions, direct access to any event variables, pattern-matching string extraction from event texts, inter-script global variable access, persistence, the ability to check and change the health of any component or application, the ability to alter the Business Value (real cost impact of an event), etc. And everything at lightning speed.

State of the Art Development Tools
ALEV has outstanding development tools to make your job easier. It has a complete development and debugging environment for Rapid Application Development (RAD). It sports online help, color-coding, syntax auto-completion and automated checking, GUI function templates, and a comprehensive interactive debugger.

Full-featured On-Demand Debugger
You can debug test scripts in a controlled development environment, or start debugging any script that is in Production whenever you want, so you can jump directly into the exact context of the problem when it appears, enormously reducing your debugging efforts.

Figure 1 - On demand debugger, a real timesaver. Just click on the "Debug Expression" checkmark on any ALEV script and an advanced debugger (with watch lists, bookmarks, tooltips, animation, step-by-step, run to cursor, and more) will help you fix any script glitch… even for scripts in Production mode.

Figure 2 - Several assistants will help you write perfect ALEV Scripts. Just press Ctrl+Space to get automated completion of functions, procedures, and variable names. Click on "Debug Expression" to invoke the On-Demand Debugger. Or use the Wizards to simplify entering complex pattern matching functions.

Ultra-fast Speed for Maximum Scalability
Besides being multithreaded, memory-efficient, and automatically pre-compiled, ALEV has another great advantage: Optimized Variable Evaluation (OVE). Usually, embedded scripting works by initializing all the variables and then leaving it up to the application to discover which ones have been modified. ALEV is smarter. ALEV will not initialize or do anything with any variable unless it is going to be actually used in the script. And after executing, ALEV marks the modified variables so it is easy for the SmartConsole to handle only the ones that have changed. As events frequently contain more than 100 variables (and only a few are referenced in the script), the execution time savings are outstanding. And it does everything automatically.

Persistent Variables for Maximum Resiliency
The SmartConsole is a highly-available product. If something goes wrong (such as an unexpected Windows shutdown) it automatically switches over a secondary, cluster-installed console, restoring its status at the point of a failure. But what happens to the custom scripts? Normally, all variables would lose their values. To prevent this, ALEV makes it easy to define a variable as "persistent". Values at moment of the switchover are automatically preserved, with zero extra programming effort.

Figure 3 - Just click on the "Persistent" checkmark and don't worry about an unexpected shutdown - the latest variable value will be automatically retrieved from disk.

This feature is excellent for complex event correlation, scenario setting, or simply to keep counters with accurate results. In any other scripting language, you would have to take care of this yourself, programmatically. ALEV saves you time.

Associative Arrays, Sets, Calendars, and more
ALEV supports integer, real, dates, strings, date arithmetic, set, set arithmetic, arrays, multidimensional arrays, associative arrays, regular expressions, etc., for maximum flexibility. The variant type is supported, so you don't need to specify the type of a variable beforehand. Calendars are also supported, and it takes only a function to know if a date is within Calendar object bands (isDateInCalendar). Sets are also easy to use, as it takes only an operator to know whether an element is in the set or not (if Element in Set then/else).

Complex Automation Made Easy
You can do a lot of complex automation on the SmartConsole without writing a single ALEV line of code. But when you really need the power of a scripting language, ALEV will let you do practically anything. Examples of automation are: disabling users across multiple Windows domains, changing roles for users across different platforms, creating random passwords and sending them through encrypted email, modifying system attributes in remote systems, holding a Windows CPU-abusive process, and more.

Extensible
If ALEV is not enough for your needs, you can extend it. You can define new ALEV functions using any language you can program a DLL on. You can call external programs right from ALEV. So you don't have to be afraid about your future needs, as you can rest assured that you'll be able to achieve your monitoring goals.

Field-Tested for More than 7 Years
ALEV was created in 2001. It has been improved and optimized a lot since then, and several new functions are regularly added. Designed as a multiplatform language, it has been ported to Linux/Unix and IBM System i (OS/400 and i5/OS). And it has fans all over the world, as it is a robust workhorse that can process millions of events per day.

The Ace Up Your Sleeve
Clean, structured, fast , robust, BSM-oriented, ALEV is perfect for event manipulation, data enrichment, complex event correlation, advanced automation, and more. It is one of the "secrets" of the SmartConsole to perform so well in the demanding monitoring situations of the real world.

(1) It handles 1.022.494 (Intel Core 2 Duo 6400 at 2.1 GHz, Windows Vista SP1, with 2 GB of RAM) basic rules per processor core (which means that a modern dual core machine can easily achieve about two million rules per second). In older hardware, it handles almost a million (984.736) rules per second in a Pentium D 830 running at 3GHz, and it can process more than 700,000 rules per second in a Pentium III CPU running at 666 MHz. These are laboratory test with only one rule containing one ALEV arithmetical-logical expression, in a pure ALEV environment, as a measure of ALEV raw rule processing speed. Actual results may vary.